Sunday, November 27, 2016

Elka Panther 300 Combo Organ Features Demonstration - Elka Capri

Published on Nov 27, 2016 Bell Tone Synth Works

"Here's a features demonstration of the Elka Panther 300 / Elka Capri combo organ. This is a really great, classic organ with three mixable footages (octaves) per note, many filter (tone) options, polyphonic bass, a great vibrato with multiple options, unusual "Mixture" footages you can add in and tone decay. There are some occasional key squeaks that you may hear at the end of the video, but this is just the sound of the physical keys rubbing against each other and would not show up on a direct-in recording or come through an amplifier. This organ is currently for sale from Bell Tony Synth Works on Reverb."

"This Elka Panther 300 / Elka Capri combo organ may not have quite the name recognition of a Farfisa or Vox, but it is known by combo organ fans as one of the classic Italian organs of the 1960s, and is unusually richly featured for a single-manual organ. It has a bold yet rich sound, a powerful vibrato and a wide variety of tone filters. This particular organ bears the name Capri, but it is exactly the same as the Elka Panther 300 organ, inside and out. According to the Combo Organ Heaven website, the Elka Panther/Capri was marketed under the two different names depending on the location.

This organ has been professionally serviced and is in great working condition. We recapped the power supply, cleaned the keyboard bus bars, replaced the tone decay lamp, replaced the knobs and tuned the oscillators. We also replaced some faulty components that were causing some parts of the organ to not function.

NOTE: The output of this organ uses a TRS (stereo) jack. The purpose of this is to allow you to use a bass amp for the bass section, and another amp for everything else. If you plug in a regular mono instrument cable, you will not hear any bass section. You can use an adapter that merges the two signals into one cable, or you can use a split cable and plug the two ends into two different amps.

The organ is generally in pretty good cosmetic shape, but there is a faded area on one back corner of the organ and the top of the organ has some scratches and a rough strip extending along the length of the top due to a chemical reaction with the lid. The strip is anywhere between two to four inches wide. It's hard to photograph due to the shininess of the plastic and is only really visible at certain angles or up close. The organ also comes with its lid and a sheet music stand and we'll include a power cable with it-- it was fitted with a standard IEC cable socket at some point in its life."